Today, wireless communication systems, such as cellular communication systems, continue new deployment and expansion at a rapid pace. The complexity of the design of these systems contributes to high costs in deployment and optimization. Some of the largest costs are in the time for skilled personnel to fine tune these systems for adequate system performance, since systems cannot be deployed with default parameter settings to control handoff algorithms. This is because local conditions between cells in any system dictates custom parameter settings to avoid poor quality that may lead to dropped calls. Calls are often dropped because the system cannot react quickly enough to handle the local conditions.
Two very common drop call scenarios are related to a poor radio environment which makes it very difficult or impossible to deliver a handoff command to a mobile station to move it away from the poor conditions. In the first scenario, a mobile station may move into the poor environment. By the time the system reacts to handoff the mobile station to the next cell, its too late. The mobile station is incapable of hearing the command, and its connection drops. In the second scenario, the communication system makes a bad decision to handoff the mobile station into a poor radio environment. The mobile station is incapable of recovering the call by commanding it to hand over to a new cell.
Because of the complexity of optimizing systems at a rate to keep up with current growth, it is imperative that a method be provided for the system to self-optimize itself so that the system can be deployed simply with default parameters. Thus, a need exists for an apparatus and method which provides these advantages.